Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records - who's read what - and this has led to people being rounded up and killed.
Any history buffs, people who like religion, suspense and mystery mixed with history, or anyone who likes 'The Da Vinci Code,' needs to read Ken Follett.
I tend to like to read history - recent history, because I find that much more intriguing than just a writer's imagination.
My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.
When I was nine I spent a lot of my time reading books about the history of comedy, or listening to the Goons or Hancock, humour from previous generations.
I could drop dead tomorrow, the truth will be here. Truth is forever; when you read our history, truth is forever, and it always outs itself.
The transition from dictatorship to democracy is always very difficult, and if you read a history of any country that went through this, it wasn't easy. And, you know, you don't end dictatorship one day and next day you have fully fledged democracy.
I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.
I read a lot of research notes about the countries I visit, and my mum and dad bought me a Kindle, but I'm still getting to grips with it. I prefer paper books.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.
Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.
A solid theatrical education can only improve a screen performance. It gives you a fuller capacity to read a script and understand a character, for one thing. It's important to alternate between the two activities.
The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
Let all Americans sit down and read this great document. Since the Constitution's ratification, it has been the framework for our great nation.
I was a Charles Schulz kind of guy. I didn't read comics books. The Warner Bros. guys were great - Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng.
To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
Reading history, one rarely gets the feeling of the true nature of scientific development, in which the element of farce is as great as the element of triumph.
I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.
If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.
